Wife, Mother, Ranter

New Year, New Pastures & Recording our life

As many of you know, I have some big changes that are planned for 2014.

I don’t want to go into too much detail here as I’m contemplating blogging our big moves on another blog. Suffice to say, we have made the decision to move to the country, somewhere that neither of us have lived before (well, not me in the UK), change jobs and move away from family and friends.

It’s a big old step, so with that all in the pipeline, we obviously didn’t make any other big committment this year.

I need to excercise, but I’m not killing myself to work out how to fit that in.

I need to focus on my painting again, but, again, I’ve not given myself any unrealistic goals.

I need to get some different direction in my life, (work wise), but I feel making this move will sort out one area of our life and I’ll accept a job and then I have time to start looking for better working environments.

We have no idea what will happen first. Job, house sale or house offer, but ideally we want to be moved by July or August so Pickle can start a new school year somewhere.

In the meantime I have two very very small projects that I’m getting off the ground – both of which were Christmas presents. One I asked for, the other I didn’t

I asked for a book called “Dear Mum. From me to you”. It’s a journal that I need to fill in during the next few years (maybe more) and at some stage I will hand it to my children. Memories that they ask me for now and will be forgotten tomorrow, but will matter when it really matters. When they are older, with children of their own, knowing something about me and their childhood will matter a lot. I know. I have a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old and my mum died over 15 years ago. Right now, any stories from my childhood about me or her would be really helpful. Alas I have a smattering of “naughty school girl” stories she told us over and over again at the dinner table because we asked so much.

Some of the pages have these sort of questions at the top:

Tell me about the time and place you were born

What are your earliest memories?

Tell me about your mum and dad.

What interesting information do you know about other people in our family?

Right through to questions like:

Describe some of the favourite outfits you wore as a young woman?

What would you do for a night-out when you were dating?

How did you feel when you found out you were pregnant with me?

I’m looking forward to answering some of these questions. Best do it now before ALL of my memory cells leave me. It’s already a slippery slope.

I think it’s such a lovely idea.

The second gift I got was from my sister and is called “One Line a Day. A five-year memory book”. This is a lovely idea, again. It is a fantastic idea if you are a sporadic diary writer, like me as it really does take about a minute to fill in each day and makes you condense your day down quite well. No meandering, fluffy stuff. No over analysing crap. Straight to the point and a handy reference point to you if you can’t remember when you had that ghastly dentist appointment or when your child lost a tooth. Most importantly it’s a lovely idea to spend those last few moments before bed, summarising your day, noting your achievements, accepting the disappointments and keeping a record of your life for your children (or maybe not, depending on the content).

I’ve only done 10 days, but have managed to keep it up. The hardest part has been starting writing the words and realising I could go on forever. It’s a good discipline to keep it short. Or try to. I have written a bit along the margin on a few occasions. I think the reason it works is that you know it won’t take long and that you don’t have to write anything meaningful. The fact you end up wanting to write more and quite possibly may write something meaningful is a bonus.

I’m really looking forward to our new year ahead and most importantly, documenting it so I look back at what an achievement it all was (hopefully).